Halo Name Was “Hated” By Microsoft And There Was Almost No Multiplayer, Says Designer

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Halo Name Was “Hated” By Microsoft And There Was Almost No Multiplayer, Says Designer

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Halo franchise is one of the most popular franchises for Xbox and it is impossible to think about Xbox without having Halo series in mind. However, it seems that Microsoft did not love the name at first and apparently “hated” it and wanted to change it.

According to FPS control designer at Bungie, Jaime Griesemer, Microsoft hated the name Halo for its mega FPS franchise. He added that Microsoft had so many reasons to change the name of Halo franchise and months went on for deciding the name for the game.

They said that it doesn’t mean anything, and to people it does mean something to, it’s not on-brand, because what we’re selling is the super soldier, not this weird space junk. In every foreign language it sounds stupid, it’s feminine–they had so many reasons why the name should be changed. They went for months and months, and they came back with a bunch of names. It was another border dispute.

He also added that Bungie nearly excluded multiplayer from Halo and only added it shortly before the game’s launch. According to Max Hoberman, the studio wanted to make the multiplayer for Halo to be more “arena-based” but, the studio was out of time and they added more head-to-head multiplayer. “It was never really by design, the way it worked. It was just a scramble to get something done”.

343 Industries is now heading the development on Halo franchise and has already developed Halo 4, Halo 5 and Halo Wars 2. Halo 5, in particular, was not received well by the fans because of its singleplayer campaign. According to the studio, Halo 5 was a learning process and these mistakes will not be repeated for Halo 6.